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In discussing this week’s Grenfell Tower tragedy in London, the British politician David Lammy has resorted to coruscating language. The inferno, he says, was a case of “corporate manslaughter.” Although he has not been specific about who he is accusing, several entities evidently have a lot of explaining to do. This includes most obviously the... Read More

If Donald Trump can keep his nerve, he will soon have consigned the North Korean nuclear farce to history – and in doing so will have done much to change the narrative of his hitherto faltering presidency. It is his Cuban-missile-crisis moment. Firmness and level-headedness are necessary in equal measure. And a victory will be... Read More

Steve Forbes once joked that if you ever find yourself in a middle seat on a plane and want to create some elbow room, try starting a conversation about U.S. monetary policy. It is a subject whose power to bore the pants off fellow passengers may diminish in coming years. Of dozens of potentially explosive... Read More

Battlefield communications in World War I sometimes left something to be desired. Hence a famous British anecdote of a garbled word-of-mouth message. As transmitted, the message ran, “Send reinforcements, we are going to advance.” Superior officers at the other end, however, were puzzled to be told: “Send three and four-pence [three shillings and four-pence], we... Read More

Trust mainstream media commentators to get their priorities right! While they dished out hell to Donald Trump the other day over his 10-minute conversation with the president of Taiwan, they could hardly have been more accommodative all these years of a rather more consequential American affront to mainland China: Barack Obama’s so-called “pivot” to Asia.... Read More

China is now widely seen as the coming superpower. But few even among the west’s China-watchers understand quite how fast this geopolitical freight train is approaching. Moreover, most western observers assume that China’s ambitions are being opposed by its East Asian rival, Japan. In the words of the Economist, Japan is “standing in the way”... Read More

Few aspirants to the American presidency have ever deployed a more effective slogan than Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” Although Hillary Clinton professed to believe that America has never stopped being great, in the end countless voters sided with Trump – and in many cases did so passionately, oblivious to all the Trumpian scandals... Read More

It is not hard to think of reasons why Hillary Clinton should not be President. Yesterday Wikileaks founder Julian Assange cited one of the best: Libya. In an interview with John Pilger, a noted Australian-born documentary maker and veteran critic of American military adventurism, he commented: “Libya more that anyone else’s war was Hillary Clinton’s... Read More

According to the London Sunday Express, Prime Minister Theresa May’s delegation to the G20 summit in Hangzhou was offered some ripe sartorial advice. Said one British participant: “We have been told that if you feel uncomfortable about people seeing you naked, you should change under your bedclothes.” Surveillance is everywhere in the sort of top... Read More

Is Donald Trump really as stupid as the press seems to think? And if not, how do we explain the press’s version of countless Trumpian controversies lately? Take, for instance, the Kovaleski affair. According to a recent Bloomberg survey, no controversy has proven more costly to Trump. The episode began when, in substantiating his erstwhile... Read More

Financial markets are notorious for irrational mood swings. But even by past standards, the recent wild gyrations in both stocks and currencies seem to have set a new record for ludicrousness. The source of the panic has, of course, been the United Kingdom’s referendum vote last week to pull out of the European Union. The... Read More

Mark Carney is a globalist’s globalist. To say the least, this seems never to have held him back in the past. His luck may be changing. Born in Canada and educated at Harvard and Oxford, he worked for Goldman Sachs in London, Tokyo, New York, and Toronto, before going into public service. His wife is... Read More

Last December I initiated a series of articles collectively headed “Why Trump Is Winning.” They were published at Forbes.com and, to say the least, my editors there seemed underwhelmed. After all, the almost universally touted conventional wisdom at the time was that Trump’s support had a low ceiling. Once the field started thinning, his negatives... Read More

Donald Trump’s speech on foreign policy on Wednesday has been widely and predictably misrepresented. The Economist, for instance, claimed to see many “errors” there, yet curiously failed to identify a single one. In suggesting his proposed strategy is riddled with contradictions, the only substantiation the magazine offered was this: Pace the Economist and its compulsion... Read More

If the polls are any guide, Donald Trump should romp home in tomorrow's New York State primary. Besides a home-state advantage, he will have key economic issues working for him. The fact is that in few regions of the United States does his case against the decline of American manufacturing resonate so powerfully. As the... Read More

In few places has Donald Trump’s rise caused more unease than in Tokyo. Indeed it is probably safe to say that, underneath an ostensibly imperturbable exterior, top Japanese officials are running far more scared than even Trump realizes. They have a lot to be scared about. Much of what the Washington establishment thinks it knows... Read More

“You cannot hope to bribe or twist – thank God! – the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.” So wrote the witty early twentieth century British man of letters Humbert Wolfe. His assessment of American journalists isn’t recorded but, where pivotal issues are concerned, they have probably... Read More

The British have woken up today to discover just how low their nation has sunk. In a remarkable snub, Chinese President Xi Jinping is reportedly insisting on bringing his own drinking water to a banquet later this month at Buckingham Palace. He and his wife have also declined to eat the proposed turbot-and-crab starter. Yet... Read More

Donald Trump seems not to have noticed yet but the Boeing aircraft company has just handed him a perfect opportunity to target the middle ground in American politics. Boeing has for decades been perhaps the most egregious corporate exemplar of what Trump rightly denounces as the stupidity and spinelessness of U.S. trade policy. That policy... Read More

As Third World migration increasingly dominates the headlines in the European Union and the United States, the rich nations of East Asia have been keeping heads their down. With good reason. True to their ultra-strict immigration policies, they have been admitting virtually no refugees. South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China are at one... Read More

Dear Lionel: I refer to your public assurances that the Financial Times’s independence will not be compromised by the Nikkei takeover. You are misinformed. Frankly, I concur with the BBC’s economics editor Robert Peston who has tweeted that this is a “desperately sad” moment. As you know, I have spent 27 years covering finance and... Read More

For decades the Financial Times has hardly had a good word to say about the Japanese economy. It is a special irony therefore that the paper’s longtime British owner, the Pearson group, has now agreed to sell it to the Tokyo-based Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei) group. How come it is Nikkei that is buying the... Read More

When the Enron scandal broke in 2001, it was not long before the press homed in on the company’s auditor Arthur Andersen. In the end Andersen was found guilty on criminal charges and was forced to exit auditing. So here is a question: which of the global Big Four auditing firms missed the recently reported... Read More

For many U.S. and British economic commentators, recent developments in China have been only slightly less scary than the seemingly endless Greek debt crisis. Supposedly if the Chinese stock meltdown gets much worse, China could be headed for the sort of depression the United States suffered in the 1930s – and perhaps bring the rest... Read More

When Lee Kuan Yew, the late Singaporean patriarch, was asked to name the twentieth century’s most consequential invention, he gave a characteristically counterintuitive answer. Not for him anything so obvious as television, antibiotics, the transistor, or the internet. His suggestion: the air-conditioner. It is a topical thought as, with the arrival of July, we enter... Read More

With the Shanghai index down nearly 20 percent from vertiginous heights reached in mid-May, a lot of people are wondering what next – and not a few are suggesting the Chinese economy is headed off a cliff. Pat Choate begs to differ. “The connection between Chinese stocks and the real economy is zero,” he pronounces.... Read More

The other day the New York Times highlighted anti-black discrimination in Japan. Focusing on the experiences of Ariana Miyamoto, a half-black/half-Japanese beauty queen who was born in Japan and enjoys full Japanese citizenship, the Timespresented a troubling and convincing account of a degree of explicit racial discrimination long unthinkable in respectable circles in the United... Read More

The news from Europe today is that the Euro-cent is fighting for its life. The coin, which is very similar to the U.S. Lincoln penny in value, color, and size, has already been abolished in the Netherlands, Finland, and Belgium. According to the Dublin-based Irish Independent newspaper, Ireland will soon become the next EU nation... Read More

President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was at least temporarily sidetracked yesterday by a vote in the lower house of Congress. The TPP is a proposed trade and investment pact that would join the United States with eleven other Pacific-fringing nations. Presented as a major part of Obama’s “pivot” to Asia, the pact notably excludes China... Read More

The London-based magazine Restaurant is generating headlines this morning for its ranking of the world’s supposedly 100 best restaurants. Boy, is the list controversial. For the well traveled, America’s showing – 13 top restaurants – looks on the high side, and so does the United Kingdom’s five. (If Restaurant’s ranking is to be credited, the... Read More

Vietnam has largely dropped out of sight since the Communists won a bloody North-South civil war in 1975. But, with a population of 93 million, it has hardly gone away. Now it is in the news again thanks to Noble, an acclaimed new movie. Directed by Stephen Bradley and starring Deirdre O’Kane, Noble is a... Read More

In this space yesterday, I suggested that most Americans make common cause in wanting to stamp out all forms of human trafficking. Not a controversial statement, I thought. But Mr. XYZ, a regular reader who, like me, shares an understanding of the extent to which America has reneged on traditional values in pursuit of globalism... Read More

Americans of all political persuasions abhor human trafficking. So why is the Obama administration pushing a highly controversial trade pact that would reward nations with some of the world’s worst human trafficking records? It is a good question, and one that has been brought into sharp focus by reports overnight of the discovery of mass... Read More

Anyone puzzled by Scotland’s increasing disaffection should take a look at a book called British Enterprise. Written by Alexander Howard and Ernest Newman, and published in 1952, the immediate afterglow of the festival of Britain, it consisted of short descriptions of each of more than 100 then world-beating British manufacturing companies. It strikingly illustrates how... Read More

The obvious question about bitcoins is who invented them. The obvious answer – certainly obvious to me – is that it was not Satoshi Nakamoto. For sure the arcane treatise that launched the bitcoin concept was authored by a person of this Japanese-sounding name. But after nearly 27 years watching the world from a base... Read More

Even in these days of light-speed communication, some information still travels as slowly as in the medieval era. Take, for instance, the recent history of global manufacturing. In the Anglophone world, many if not most of the more prominent commentators have long held that a first-rank economy no longer needs manufacturing. The Economist magazine in... Read More

In this space last Sunday, I highlighted House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to address a joint session of Congress. As I pointed out, never before has a Japanese Prime Minister been accorded such an honor. Yet of all Japan’s post-1945 Prime Ministers, Abe would appear to be the least... Read More

Perhaps the highest honor the United States can confer on a foreign dignitary is to invite him or her to address both houses of Congress. Invitees join an exclusive club that has included such esteemed figures as Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Yitzhak Rabin, Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, and Corazon Aquino. Now the currency is... Read More

Since the Netherlands became the world’s first nation to recognize same-sex marriage in 2001, the concept has spread rapidly. If Wikipedia is to be believed, at last count 16 national jurisdictions had followed suit. So had 36 U.S. states. The concept has had its greatest acceptance in Western and Northern Europe, but parts of Latin... Read More

It seems only yesterday that most of the world’s largest corporations were based in the United States. In the auto industry, for instance, there was General Motors, which not only towered over Ford and Chrysler but made Toyota and Volkswagen look positively Lilliputian. Those days are gone. On most measures Toyota and Volkswagen are now... Read More

Oil prices swooned on Thursday as John Kerry claimed a major breakthrough in talks with Iran. They later recovered a bit but markets remained unsettled. Will the deal sink oil prices? Probably not. Even if the Obama administration succeeds in getting a workable deal through Congress (a significant “if,” of course), there are at least... Read More

In the spring of 1995 – twenty years ago almost to the day – I published a book about Japan entitledBlindside. Endorsed by such long-time Japan watchers as James Fallows, Sir James Goldsmith, and John Kenneth Galbraith (Galbraith had clocked considerable on-the-spot experience as a senior official of the American occupation in the late 1940s),... Read More

When Singapore’s success first attracted notice, American and British economists scrambled to claim it as a victory for textbook laissez-faire. Supposedly if only the United States and the United Kingdom would let markets rip, they too could enjoy Singapore-like growth. This could hardly have been more wrong. In common with virtually ever other economy, Singapore... Read More

A famous maxim has it that in the short run markets are voting machines, but in the longer run weighing machines. The point is that though short run movements can be remarkably fickle and irrational, markets do – eventually – self-correct and produce reasonable prices. But “eventually” can be a long time, especially where currency... Read More

The Financial Times this morning carries an important exclusive on British Prime Minister David Cameron’s defiance of a White House effort to counter Chinese financial power. The White House had been trying to organize a G7 boycott of the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which is seen in Washington as a Chinese-inspired rival to the... Read More

Those who know their history know that the British have a special knack for pioneering influential new political ideas. A latter-day example is Nigel Farage, head of the anti-EU UKIP party, who today threw down the gauntlet in a daring challenge to Europe’s unpopular continent-wide free market in labor. He argued for a reverse-course in... Read More

How much silicon is there in Silicon Valley? Not much, if we are talking super-pure monocrystalline silicon, which is the high-end material driving the digital revolution. As with countless other advanced materials these days, most of the world’s semiconductor-grade silicon comes from Japan (yes, Japan Inc has kept on trucking even if this is rarely... Read More

The big news this morning is that “Jihadi John” has been identified. According to the Washington Post, the barbaric executioner who has featured in several ISIS beheading videos is Mohammed Emwazi. Born in Kuwait, he is a British citizen who grew up in a well-to-do family in London and earned a British degree in computer... Read More

In my early days as a financial journalist, I worked for the Anglo-French publisher Sir James Goldsmith. Although I can’t say I knew him well, he was a presence around the building, and he went on to provide a fulsome commendation for a book I published in 1995. One of his memorable characteristics was his... Read More

U.S. corporations have sometimes made the mistake of believing they are loved for their own sake in China. In reality an ever-calculating Beijing has welcomed the intellectual property and marketing expertise they bring. And now that they have been largely sucked dry, Beijing no longer sees any need to make nice. Quite the contrary. Under... Read More

I ain't Japanese or even Asian but I could understand the Japanese having a deep distrust of the United States. What, after being used as experimental human lab rats for the US atom bomb program in WW2.

Your assertions that all women crave black dong is really hilarious. Just looking at the face of a negro repulses me and most women that I know (White and Asian). The idea you are projecting that the negro somehow has a magical pull that makes all women sleep with him while you constantly try...